Episode 12: Linda Sok – Imagined memories and healing through art
The stories we hear growing up have great power over us. From folklore, and fairy tales, to anecdotal moments, shared in fragments by our family members, these stories are essentially imagined memories that are always created and re-remembered in ways that speak to the present. Memories of migration, displacement, conflicts, and racism, can be difficult to understand when we have not directly experienced them. So how do we deal with these past stories? How is history, and especially painful histories, being digested by younger generations? And why is it important to remember?
In this episode, I invited Cambodian-Australian artist Linda Sok. Linda works primarily with textiles and sculptural installations that investigate the complexities of trauma embedded in the Cambodian diaspora. Her family fled Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge Regime to Australia and Linda would hear stories from her family members about the critical move away from home. These stories and memories of her family inform her artmaking. We spoke about childhood stories, google translate, family group chats, and how art can be a space for us to heal together.
About Linda Sok
Linda Sok is a second-generation descendant of survivors of the Khmer Rouge Regime, a genocidal period in Cambodia’s history which forced her family to flee Cambodia. By accessing fragments of Cambodia's traumatic past, Sok attempts to recontextualise lost traditions and culture to allow living descendants to process the history through a decolonised contemporary lens. She sees her practice as a biomythography, positioning historical events, cultural objects, and personal and familial stories, as archives from which she can begin to build a narrative for Cambodia’s and her own past and future.
Sok graduated from the University of New South Wales Art & Design in Australia with a degree in Fine Arts and was awarded First Class Honours and the University Medal. Sok has exhibited internationally in institutions such as Center for Craft (North Carolina), Textile Arts Center (New York), Multicultural Arts Center (Massachusetts), Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne), Artspace (Sydney), Casula Powerhouse Art Center (Sydney), and Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane).
Find out more at linda-sok.com
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.